Currently cooking from The Best Simple Recipes from America’s Test Kitchen

I was having a bad day when I made this dish. Everything seemed to go wrong. I used too small of a pot to cook the pasta and went through three more pots putting this dish together (which resulted in cool pasta, unwilted spinach and a pile of dishes). I kept dropping the knife as I was cutting up the chicken (fortunately not on any of my extremities). And I burned most of the pine nuts instead of toasting them. Even after that the dish still came out fine.

This is pretty much a simpified pasta alfredo with spinach and chicken. You start off by browning chicken, then making up a quick sauce of garlic, lemon zest and juice and a half of a cup of cream. Meanwhile, you cook a pot of pasta and drain it, reserving about a half of a cup of the pasta cooking water. The pasta, sauce, chicken, spinach, pine nuts, Parmesan cheese and the reserved water are put back into the pot and mixed together. The heat of the pasta wilts the spinach, and the reserved water thins the cream sauce.

My biggest complaint about this dish is that I wanted more sauce. In fact, when we ate the leftovers the next day, I made another batch of the sauce. So, if you like your pasta a little saucy, double the sauce.

Oh, and make sure you use a big pot to make the pasta.